PARIS. The most anticipated trial opens today 8 September in the historic Palace of Justice on the Île de la Cité. A few steps from Notre-Dame, it is the place where Marie Antoinette, Danton, Baudelaire were judged for The flowers of evil, Émile Zola per il J’accuse Marshal Pétain for collaborating with the Nazis.
Today it will be up to Salah Abdeslam, 31, Belgian from a Moroccan family. At the stand, he will have to explain what he did on the night between 13 and 14 November 2015, together with the commando-kamikaze who killed 130 people in a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, in the terraces of bars and restaurants, and outside the Stade de France, where a friendly match between France and Germany was about to be played.
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Abdeslam is an enigma. AND the tenth man, the tenth man, the only terrorist who survived those Isis suicide attacks. Why didn’t he blow himself up? Fear? Or an unspeakable attachment to life? Or perhaps it was planned that he would not sacrifice himself in order to continue serving as ferryman, as a driver of jihadists around Europe, from Death Conveyor, carrier of death, as the title of a compelling investigative book published by the French editions Équateurs says? He signs it Etty Mansour, pseudonym of a writer-journalist who tried to get inside the head of the “kamikaze interruptus”, immersing herself for four years in the milieu from which it sprang – Molenbeek, the Islamized neighborhood of Brussels – and by questioning friends, neighbors, acquaintances. Plus Nour, the girlfriend who doesn’t want to hear about him anymore.
“I gave the floor to the witnesses” explains the author to Friday. “It was not my intention to set myself up as a judge and deliver a truth to the reader. There will always remain a part of mystery in the mind of one who decides to sever ties with his fellow men. But this does not authorize us not to try to understand”.
Salah Abdeslam was arrested in Belgium and sentenced to twenty years for terrorism. Whatever the Parisian verdict of the special Court of Assizes will be, his life is already screwed up, incinerated, gone to hell. Mansour reconstructs the trajectory of a “jihadist next door” in parallel with the emergence of globalized Islamic radicalism: “Abdeslam is the same age as Al-Qaeda”.
Dreaming of Scarface
A father who was a former bus driver, an overprotective mother, three brothers and a sister, Salah was not a bad start. Having obtained a diploma as an electrical engineer, he is also hired in public transport, as a maintenance worker. But, after a year, they kick him out for absenteeism. The steady job is tight for him. Smart guy, histrionic, seducer, a little boaster, he prefers the life of expedients: dealing, robberies, thefts. He speaks badly Arabic and knows almost nothing about the Koran. He wants to be an American. You dream Scarface. But it will become the bleak emblem of a lost generation that Europe has thrown away without knowing what to do with it, only to realize it existed when it literally exploded in its face.
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In the beginning, religion has nothing to do with it. Salah’s only motive is money, the money with which the nets of the Islamist armed struggle grab drifters, devoting them to the mission of the great revenge Muslim, to martyrdom. Before the extreme sacrifice, however, the benefits rain down: jeeps, cash to burn at parties, brothels, casinos, gay bars where Salah plays the gigolo. He does not prostitute himself: he robs clients of identity documents that will be falsified for the cause.
During the gloomy days, Abdeslam and the goodfellas of the neighborhood get stunned by beer and joints, in the inner rooms of the bars they watch the videos of the beheadings on the computer as if they were TV series. The Isis Caliphate promises the great leap: from petty gangsterism to eternal life. Abdeslam’s brother, Brahim – who will blow himself up in a Parisian bar – leaves to go to fight in Syria. He doesn’t follow him. He likes the rearguard work more, the logistical organization on the continent: finding explosives, renting dens for comrades. Until, in 2015, the going gets tough.
L’dose horribilis opens with the massacre in the Parisian editorial office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. It is the signal that a massacre military campaign is being prepared in Europe. The one that culminated in the massacre of the Bataclan and nightlife bars.
Silence and prayers
As the book recounts, Paris is seen by Islamist guappi as a mixture of attraction and rejection. It is the capital of sex, of high, of sin, which fascinates, but must be punished. The story of that murderous night is still not entirely clear. Abdeslam was it chauffeur suicide bombers. According to plans, he should have sacrificed himself too. But he will claim that his explosive belt misfired. Salah gets rid of it and stealthily manages to return to Belgium, to Molenbeek, his lair.
[[ge:rep-locali:repubblica:315983648]]He’s been in prison for five years now. Behind bars it has become radicalized. This time really. Speak very little. Pray or read the Koran. “Islamism is the new mask he wore to make the coward forget,” says Etty Mansour. “Prisons are incubators of radicalism. And perhaps he feels that now his mission is proselytizing among prisoners. Of course, he is Islamized. afterwards, when things are done. But, in his case, talking about ‘rapid radicalization’ can be misleading. Because it was already impregnated with jihad as a culture, imaginary, totalitarian ideology, a narrative that must be fulfilled in an objective “.
[[ge:rep-locali:repubblica:140257029]]Will the Taliban reconquest in Afghanistan revive terrorism in Europe? – I ask the writer. Answer: “There is something indecent in your question. Shouldn’t we worry about the Afghan people first?”
Given his silence and reticence, a lawyer could not be found for Salah Abdeslam. In the end, he will be defended Master Olivia Ronen, 31, same age as the accused. A woman for the ex macho womanizer. Wicked irony of history. But perhaps also the greatness of law.
On the Friday of September 3, 2021
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